"Did you ever taste any sort of canned meat as good as this chicken in your life? Lobster simply isn't in it! It's fatted calf for me. My mother keeps me in it; but I never open a jar when I'm alone; I'm not that selfish, anyway. Cold pack, of course, as you know, Mrs. Kenworthy. We had a family scrap about it the last time I went home. My sister Isobel—she's an awful woman as far as she can manage to be—she said to me, 'Now look here, Isobel' (she's always trying to boss me around), 'you can just find a deadly germ in canned chicken. I'm not going to have mother worried to death canning chicken for you to guzzle any longer. She's too old, and so are you. You can just tell her you've got poisoned by it and you aren't going to eat it any longer.' 'I'll be damned if I'll find a deadly germ in it,' I told her. 'If you don't want mother doing it for me, you can do it yourself.' After all you can't just stand your relations imposing on you forever, can you? Not if you have as many as I have! I just made an announcement then and there. My fees for removing appendices are canned fat chicken, and those strawberry preserves they make in the sun so they keep the right color of red. I'm not going to eat city chickens that have been shut up in a little coop on Fifty-seventh Street. I want contented hens that have crowed in the barns I have played in. Nice sunny barn doors! Don't you love barn doors on spring days when all the hens are cackling? What do I practically keep a bed in the Presbyterian Hospital full of my fifty-two first cousins for, anyway, if I have to eat canned salmon on occasions of haste? There are limits to my patience. What are you snickering at, Martha? That's not a pun!"
With such banalities she kept them aroused, expectant. There was no constraint; no one of the three was thinking of something amusing to say; each knew very well she would have no chance to say anything amusing, however well prepared she might be. The doctor never ceased for a minute.
Finally she folded up her tongue for the night and left them together there.
"Is she always like that?" Emily murmured.
"Oh no, I don't think so. I don't know her very well. I never had a meal here before. You've made a hit with her, mammie! She sort of owns Miss Curtis. Maybe she took care of her through—THAT—or something. Anyway, Miss Curtis told her about you, and that's why she asked you to stay here. Of course, she just took me in because Miss Curtis has been fussing about me studying in the kitchen ever since she saw our house. She's made up her mind—the doctor has—that Miss Curtis has got to put those girls out, when she can, because they're so thoughtless about her, and everything, and that I'm to have those front rooms and do them over to suit myself. She bosses everybody around. I guess she thinks she's got a lot more sense than most people, and so she ought to tell them where to get off. You can see why she's got such a practice. Can't you just see her sailing into somebody's sick-room with her tail up, that way, and making them wild to get up and be strong as a horse, like she is? Miss Curtis says she's the only woman who ever got through medical school and got a practice without losing her color. She doesn't pay very much attention to me. She's busy, 'most always. Sometimes she gets to talking about some interesting case, and goes on half the night. I never get a word in edgewise. I just listen."
Emily, as she lay waiting for sleep, said to herself: "Well, if horrible things happen to us when we don't expect them, so do lovely things. If I'd searched this city over for two friends for Martha, I'd never have found any equal to these two. The doctor's just a clean gale blowing through Martha. She'll clean out her mind; she'll do for her what I never could. Why should I want to do everything in the world that's done for her? Why can't I be satisfied to see those women helping her along?"
She went back to her home more happy about Martha than she had been for months. Mrs. Benton had already gone East and it promised to be a quiet winter for club-women in general The one great event of it was to be the annual Christmas party for children. Mrs. Benton had instituted the custom the winter before, the first year of the new dance hall. She had given a splendid party that once. She left a committee behind her to try to follow her example.
They were discussing it at lunch. Emily had realized that the women across from her were talking about ways of finding good jobs for girls who had to leave high school, when Mrs. Bissel leaned across towards her and asked:
"Mrs. Kenworthy, by the way, what's this new job Martha's got? What's she planning to do?"
There were four women who might be supposed to be listening in that pause with more or less curiosity for Emily's reply.